1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication apparatus, an electronic mail transmitting method, and an electronic mail transmitting program, which transmit electronic mails according to a predetermined transmission protocol.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with proliferation of computers and networking of information, electronic mail communication for exchanging character information via a network has been prevailing. Electronic mail can transmit not only the body of an electronic mail message as character information but also files in various formats as an attachment thereto. For example, Internet FAX, which transmits and receives image data as an attached file in the TIFF (Tag Image File Format) format has come into proliferation.
Internet FAX (hereinafter referred to “iFAX”) is a communication technique used for communication between a transmitting apparatus and a receiving apparatus, in which the transmitting apparatus converts image data read using a scanner into the TIFF format and transmits the TIFF image data to the receiving apparatus, and the receiving apparatus prints out the received TIFF image data. To secure compatibility between a plurality of apparatuses, the specification of TIFF image data for communication is standardized in details in the technical specification RFC (Request for Comments) 2301 by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) which is an organization for standardizing Internet techniques.
Further, a SMTP authentication technique in which when transmitting an electronic mail to the mail address of a transmission destination according to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), user authentication is carried out by a mail server before transmission, so as to prevent illegal replaying of an electronic mail with a false mail address, is standardized in the technical specification RFC 2554. An example of such conventional technique of transmitting an electronic mail after execution of user authentication is described e.g. in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. H11-234496.
Furthermore, the assignee of the present application has already proposed a method in which when a user logs in to an authentication server in advance before transmitting an electronic mail, to have his/her user name and password authenticated, he/she acquires an electronic mail address associated with the authenticated user name, and then transmits the electronic mail to the mail address of a transmission destination, using the acquired mail address as the address of the transmission source (Japanese Patent Application No. 2003-066857).
However, even the proposed electronic mail transmitting method remains to be improved in the following points.
When an electronic mail is transmitted using the SMTP authentication, if set values (i.e. a user name and a password) specific to an apparatus (e.g. a communication apparatus, such as a MFP (Multi-Function Peripheral)) are used as the user name and password for SMTP authentication, a log of the user name of a user who logged in to the authentication server can be stored as a transmission log in the apparatus. However, only the user name specific to the apparatus is stored in the mail server. As a result, the log stored in the apparatus is different from the log stored in the mail server, which makes it difficult to correlate these logs with each other, and hence to identify the real sender. Further, there still remains the possibility that a person other than the user, who knows the user name and password specific to the apparatus, might perform a transmitting operation using the mail address as a disguised user.
Although this inconvenience can be avoided by inputting the user name and password used for SMTP authentication without using the user name and password specific to the apparatus each time an E-mail is transmitted using SMTP authentication, this leads to degradation of operability.